Well, it’s very interesting thinking back on this hunt with
the benefit of hindsight. This made my 6th
year in a row to be going on an elk hunt in Wyoming with my friend Mike from
Powell, WY.
It has somewhat morphed into a family vacation of sorts and
we pull our travel trailer up there and my wife and son come with and the last
3 years we’ve been bringing one of his friends along as well. Getting everything ready for the trip is
always hectic, but we had the added fun of a fridge going out, the furnace on
the trailer not working, buying new batteries for the trailer, a new tire, etc.
the two days before we were going to leave.
We finally had everything thrown together and at least in the trailer
and we headed out.
Thankfully, the trip up was uneventful and we got settled in
at our normal camping spot late the afternoon before opening morning. I was still pretty unorganized as a lot of
stuff had just been thrown into the trailer and it was well after dark before I
had things sorted out and ready for the next morning. I’ve been planning ahead for my New Mexico
elk hunt that I’m going to be backpacking in on and I bought a new backpack for
that trip that just barely arrived in time to try out on this hunt. The timing was so close that I actually had
it shipped to my friend’s house as he was leaving a day later and closer to
where the pack was being shipped from as well.
I was worried about trying to put everything together on the pack when I
got there, but thankfully Kurt at Stone Glacier had put my bag on the frame and
my rifle sling on as well for me so I just had to get the pack loaded up with
everything I brought. Somewhere around
10:00, I had things sorted out and hit the sack, my alarm set for 4:44 am.
A big benefit to hunting the same area for several years in
a row is that there really isn’t a big need for scouting things out. We knew where we wanted to be when shooting
light arrived on opening morning a long time ago. After a short ride in the pickup, it was time
to pull the GPS out and head out in the dark toward our waypoints that we had
marked on the way to where we wanted to go.
It was a little chilly out with the truck thermometer showing 26
degrees, but the wind wasn’t blowing and wasn’t raining and the forecast was
for it to warm up to the mid 60’s by the end of the day so it was actually a
pretty nice day.
The hike into our spot was pretty quiet. The moon was pretty bright and the last ¼ mile
or so we were able to turn our headlamps off and get setup in our spots pretty
quietly. “Our spot”, had been very good
to us over the last 6 years. The
previous 5 years we have been into elk on opening morning every year, we were
hoping that this year would not be any different.
Shooting light arrived and things were still pretty
quiet. The wind was blowing a little bit
and sure enough it was right at our backs blowing where we were thinking the
elk would be. Really not much we could
do about it now, so we just hunkered down and waited a bit. I threw out a few cow calls, but sunrise came
and went and things were still quiet. No
far off bugles, no up close bugles, nothing but quiet. We decided to hang out for a while to see if
things were just running late, but by 8:00 it was pretty obvious that “our spot”
might not be quite as good as it had been this year. After some scouting around it was pretty
clear that there just wasn’t the elk activity this year that there was normally
in the area. We decided to leave our
spot and check out some other areas close by.
There was a steep bench dropping off into a canyon about ½ mile
away and a saddle that has some activity in it sometimes so we started off in
that direction. We moved slow, looking
for sign and trying to be quiet. We
still weren’t seeing much sign, but did finally come across a couple very fresh
rubs and were finding a little bit of sign here and there. We decided to go check out a wallows about ½ mile
away and were messing with the GPS when we were interrupted by a bugle not too
far off, maybe 500 or 600 yards. We
immediately forgot all about the wallows and slowly started off in the
direction of the bugle.
Maybe 10 or 15 minutes later we hear a bugle again, but it’s
farther away now. This was still the
only thing we’ve heard so we were going to be following it until either it shut
up or we got busted one way or the other.
My memory isn’t perfect here, but I think we heard 2 more bugles as we
were working that way, with the second one being fairly close to us. We quickly setup about 20 yards apart from
each other and I made a couple cow calls.
I didn’t get a response to my diaphragm mouth call, but when I used the “I
MAKA DA BULL CRAZY” estrus cow call I got an immediate response and it sounded
very close. Rifles were out and ready, wind
was pretty much dead calm, we were ready for some action! Another bugle pretty quickly after the first
and I thought I heard some branches snapping in that direction. Our heads were on a swivel as we knew it
wouldn’t be unexpected for the bull to circle around and try to come in behind
us so we were on full alert.
A little background on the area that we are hunting in,
other than a few open areas, it is pretty much dark timber. That’s where we were at now. If you are lucky you can find a shooting lane
50 – 75 yards, but most of the time you are limited to 20 or 30 yards of visibility. A rifle has an advantage over a bow here, not
really because of it’s range, but because of the ability to get off a quick
shot without having to draw a bow and because you can take some shot angles
that you wouldn’t be able to with a bow.
Another 10 or 15 minutes go by and nothing. We decided that if he wouldn’t come to us,
that we were going to have to go to him.
Again, my memory fails me a little here, I don’t remember if I cow
called as we started toward him, or not, but just a few minutes after heading
out going slowly and as quietly as we could, I see a bull trotting away in the
trees about 30 yards ahead of us. I for
sure cow called then, and he wasn’t really busting out, but he didn’t stop
either. I didn’t get a good look at him,
but I got enough of a look to know that he was a legal bull.
The area that we hunt is a branch antlered bull only area,
no cows or spikes allowed. This was a
general tag and I hate to call it a meat hunt, but with the number of bulls
that we normally see each year it isn’t a unit where you have the opportunity
to look over several different bulls and be choosy. I’ve shot the first legal bull that I had a
shot opportunity on the previous 5 years of hunting the area and that was 2
bulls. Both 5 X 5’s, one decent, and one
pretty much a raghorn. My standards hadn’t
gone up, I was going to shoot the first legal bull that I had a shot
opportunity on this year as well. To me,
any elk DIY on public land is a trophy.
Okay, back to the hunt.
The one bull had trotted off and while we hadn’t closed the deal on him,
it was at least a positive experience to be on a bull. He hadn’t bolted so I’m still going to head
after him and start that way and maybe about 50 yards away an elk barks at me. At the time I thought this was the same elk,
but my buddy says that the first elk was smaller and kept trotting off and the
one that did the barking was a different elk.
For sure the elk doing the barking was close and didn’t know what I was
so I immediately let out a couple cow calls on my diaphragm mouth call and kept
heading his way. He trotted off a bit and
I caught a glimpse of him and saw that he was a branch antlered bull, but I
didn’t see much else. I cow called again
and he barked again. I kept moving
toward him and he kept trotting off a little bit and stopping. This repeated several times and one of the
times he barked at me it was an odd bark that almost turned into a bugle at the
end.
It seemed like this went on forever, but we might have only
covered 50 or 60 yards when it was all said and done. Finally I caught a glimpse of him through the
trees and he was standing there looking at me.
I could still see that he was a legal bull, but not much else. Somehow there was a tiny gap about 9 or 10
inches wide in the trees right where his vitals were. He was quartering to me at a pretty tight
angle, but I could see the spot behind his front right shoulder where a bullet
needed to go. I edged up to a tree and
rested my rifle against it, had a good rest and felt good about the shot and
squeezed the trigger.
He wheeled around and I jacked another shell in and went to
run after him, dropped my cow call out of my mouth somehow and it was pretty
much chaos. I could hear him stumbling
around a bit, for sure he wasn’t bolting out of there so I went back the couple
of yards and grabbed my cow call and called a couple times real quick, grabbed
my empty casing and headed back toward where I heard the bull. There was a tiny little open area that he was
going to have to cross based on the direction he was headed so I headed that
way.
About 10 yards that direction and I see him stumbling
around. I pull up my rifle to shoot him
again and about that time he goes down. I
watch for a little and he takes 4 or 5 breaths and then breaths no more. He’s finished. At this time, still all I know is that he is
a legal bull. The excitement is still
there regardless of how big he is. Now
standing there watching him I realize he is a little better than a legal
bull. I shout out to my buddy that he’s
down and that he’s a nice one. Still
shaking a little from the excitement and I start walking up to him. He keeps getting bigger!
At first I couldn’t figure out whether he was a big 5 point
or a 6 point. Surely those back tines
couldn’t be his 5ths! As I got closer I realized
they were! Okay, I can’t be that lucky,
he’s probably all broken up on the other side.
Here’s what he looked like as I walked up to him.
As I got up to him it only got better. Instead of being broken on the other side, it
matched up almost perfectly with his left side.
Even better, he had a nice devil’s tine on his right G1! It didn’t take long to realize that this was
going to involve a caping job as this elk was going to the taxidermist.
It was just after 10:00 on opening morning and I had shot
the biggest elk of my life and probably the biggest elk that I ever will shoot
in my life. It still hadn’t all sunk in
yet, I had a tape in my pack, but didn’t pull it out to measure him yet.
It seems like you can never take enough pictures, so we set
out trying to prove that saying wrong. 2
cell phones and 2 point and shoot cameras and about 30 or 40 minutes later and
we were done taking pictures. Of course we didn’t take enough pictures when
it was all said and done! Here are a few
of the best ones I think.
It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Then the work started. It was warming up already so we got to it
getting him quartered up and ready to pack out.
I quickly snapped off a couple blades on my havalon knife getting started
caping him, but was able to get back in the swing of things and we had him
caped and quartered without too much difficulty. I’m going to be on my New Mexico hunt by
myself so I was thinking through what I would need to do differently if I was
by myself. One thing going for me is
that I really doubt I will need to cape that bull because it is going to be
extremely doubtful that I’m going to shoot one bigger than this one.
I decided that it wasn’t going to be too much extra weight
to go ahead and haul the head and cape out together instead of getting him
fully caped right then, so I just caped him up to the base of the neck and
trimmed off what I could and cut his tongue out from the back side so I was
only carrying about 10 extra pounds of skull out over what I would have to
carry out if I fully caped him and skull capped him in the field.
One other thing of note is that we were able to recover the
bullet. I shoot the Winchester E-Tip in
150 grain out of my Browning A-Bolt 7mm Rem Mag and have been very pleased with
their performance in the past. I’ve
recovered 2 bullets previously out of a couple different mule deer bucks that
were shot at severe angles and they both petaled out just like in the
literature for the bullets. I need to
get this one on a reloading scale to figure out if it just didn’t expand like
it should have or if the petals broke off, or exactly what happened, but
tentatively it looks like this might have been a bullet failure. It still did it’s job and I’m thinking it
must have just lost some petals, I’ll probably make a post later once I get it
figured out. Here’s a picture of the
recovered bullet.
We carried the quarters in the game bags off about 100 yards
and got them in the shade and hauled the head and cape over there as well. The area that we hunt typically has plenty of
bears and the last thing we wanted to come back to was a bear on the
carcass. The bears seem to like the gut
pile the best so getting everything moved off a bit is the only way to do it in
bear country.
We kind of thought through what we had in front of us as far
as packing him out and decided that we had 5 full loads to go out. With 2 of us that made it an odd number, but
my buddy is 10 years older than me and I figured I would just haul the last
load out by myself and give him a break.
If the head and cape together ended up being too big of a load for me,
we decided that we would finish the caping job and he could carry that
out. I’m almost embarrassed to tell how far we had
to pack him out (not very far), but we decided to just go ahead and split it up
into the 5 loads instead of trying to kill ourselves doing it in 4 loads which
would have been 2 trips out with 2 of us.
The first load out was with what we already had in our
backpacks plus the lightest loads we could find. When I quarter an elk up I tend to put it in
4 bags. I also bone everything out in
the field. Each hindquarter gets it’s
own bag, the boned out front shoulders go in a bag together and all the loose
meat goes in one bag (backstraps, neck meat, tenderloins, and whatever else I
trim off). It generally ends up with 4
bags at about the same weight. On the
average bull elk they weigh between 50 and 60 pounds each.
The second load out was probably the easiest for me, I think
I carried the loose meat on that trip which was the heaviest load we had on the
meat. With an empty pack and not
carrying my rifle it was the lightest load out.
Probably around 70lbs. I really
liked the Stone Glacier backpack on these trips, especially the first trip out,
I didn’t have to take anything out of my pack to make room or stick a bag of
bloody meat in my pack, I just released all the compression straps, stuck the
meat bag in the load shelf, cinched everything back up and was off. Really pretty slick.
I’ve always been a big fan of pack out pictures so on the
last load out we got a bunch of pictures.
Turned out that I was able to handle the load, but I wouldn’t want to
carry much more than that. When we got
back to camp we weighed my pack and it came in just under 100lbs. Again the load shelf on the pack worked out
slick. I just tucked the nose into the
load shelf, ran the pack up over the head and then snugged up all the
compression straps and it was good to go.
There is no way to keep a load like that from being awkward, but it
really wasn’t too bad.
Here’s a couple pictures loaded up before we headed back to
the truck.
I wasn’t sure about carrying it out with the antlers pointed
up instead of previously I’ve always carried out the antlers pointing down, but
the way it went in the pack was much easier this way. Turns out I think it was easier with them
like this because it kept them out of the lower brush and going over deadfall
was much easier. I don’t know how this
poor guy made his way through the forest very well though, with an outside
spread of 55” you had to be careful on your route selection, I had to make a
detour after hanging up in between these two trees.
On this load I was pretty happy that I didn’t have to go too
far. That pack started getting heavy
toward the end. In those first few
pictures I didn’t have any orange on the antlers but for the packout I
did. After going through some more trees
the orange slipped off one antler, but thankfully we didn’t see anyone else on
the way out.
This is one of my favorite pictures that we took. We ended up back on the road for about 100
yards before we got to the truck and were walking up the road and I noticed the
shadow that I was casting with the antlers on my back. Thought the picture turned out really neat.
Last little bit and then I’m going to wrap this up. When we got back to the truck we just put the
pack and the head in there and headed back to camp. I had a scale back and camp and wanted to try
to weigh the pack if I could.
Here’s a picture of the head in the pack once we got back to
camp.
Took a bit to figure out how to get the pack hung on the
scale, but we got it sorted out and picked it up. It seemed heavier back at camp!
Here’s the scale.
I had forgotten to calibrate the scale and once we got it
weighed it was showing 5 pounds with nothing on it so that puts the load
somewhere between 95 and 100 pounds, maybe a little closer to 100 than 95. I think I’ll go ahead and just say it was 100
pounds!
One of the best parts of this trip, being able to share it
with my son! It was worth the extra 10
pounds hauling it out for him to be able to see it with the hide still on the
skull.
I think I’ll wrap this up for now. Still have a few more days of the hunt left
that I will share in another post.
Still kind of in shock at being able to take such a
beautiful animal.
Nathan
